On Savitri
THEME/S
THE OPENING OF SAVITRI1
SOME QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON
BOOK ONE CANTO ONE
1
Would you kindly help me to understand the following points in Savitri (International University Centre Edition, with the Author's Letters on the Poem, 1954)?
P. 3. "A power of fallen boundless self..." Is it the same as "The huge foreboding mind of Night"?
Pp. 3, 4. The above-mentioned "power" longing "to reach its end in vacant Nought", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown", "Repeating for ever the unconscious act...", and the Earth wheeling "abandoned in the hollow gulfs" - are these movements successive or simultaneous? The doubt has come on my reading a certain published explanation.
P. 8. "The single Call, the uncompanioned Power..." Is the Power "uncompanioned" because the Goddess of Light was alone, without the aid of Power, and now the Power 'is alone without the aid of Light?
P. 6 " ...her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds."
Does the word "fire" imply that all leapt to life or that all rose in aspiration?
1 Published in Mother India, January and February 1969
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Perhaps your first two points will be best clarified against the background of what seems to me the meaning in general of the difficult opening passage.
One may easily suppose that the description in this passage is of the beginning of the cosmos, the universal evolution from the Inconscient. But I believe that the description is not directly of any such thing, though certainly connected with it. Just as we get a clue to the dawn in the line,
This was the day when Satyavan must die,[p. 10]
we get a clue to the night preceding the dawn in the line:
As in a dark beginning of all things...[p. 1]
Attend to that "As". The night depicted is comparable to the beginning of the cosmos: it is not itself the starting-point of the universal evolution. It is, as a letter of Sri Aurobindo's1 suggests, "a partial and temporary darkness". This darkness is made a "symbol", as that same letter indicates, of a state "of the soul and Nature". The symbolic character is referred to in the very passage by the line:
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse...[Ibid.]
One particular night, followed by one particular dawn which, like this symbolic night, is a "symbol dawn" (Canto-heading): such is the opening scene of Savitri's drama. The particularity is clear when from the immense nocturnal space-scape we focus down to the wheeling Earth
Thrown back once more into unthinking dreams... [Ibid.]
1 Savitri (1954), p.829.
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"Thrown back once more" - that is to say, forced to undergo a fresh fall like many a previous retrogression, like night after preceding night in the course of the long past.
And a similar turn in another letter by Sri Aurobindo1 directs us to the particularity as well as to the symbolisation. Saying that the description is not "simply of physical night and physical dawn" but that either of them is "what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised", Sri Aurobindo goes on to declare of the inner reality behind the night-symbol: "here it is a relapse into Inconscience..." The word "relapse", like the phrase "Thrown back once more", is an indisputable index of a new setback, involving here an unconscious state, as happens every night in the twenty-four-hour cycle through which we repeatedly pass.
In the poem itself our interpretation is supported when "a nameless movement, an unthought Idea" stirred the Inconscience and it was as though even in "dissolution's core" there lurked a surviving entity
Condemned to resume the effort and the pang,
Reviving in another frustrate world.[p. 2]
"Resume", "reviving", "another" - all these are signposts to a particular night about to end, a period of darkness with - before and an after of the same kind. A before and an after are implied also when, a little later, a "hesitating hue" on the eastern horizon, like a scout from the sun,
...conquering Nature's disillusioned breast,
Compelled renewed consent to see and feel.[p. 3]
1 Ibid., p. 907.
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A disillusioning day preceding the night, a forced renewal of hope in the succeeding dawn, as in a past sequence again and again, are suggested.
It may be argued: "Though a cycle of darkness and light is there, precluding a direct account of a straight once-for-all evolution from a cosmic Inconscience, the cycle is not diurnal but aeonic. The Indian cosmogonic theory speaks of a repeated emergence of the universe from the Unmanifest and a repeated disappearance into it: there comes a pralaya, a dissolution, after which once more a manifesting process starts. Sri Aurobindo shows us a new cosmic relapse into Inconscience and a new cosmic emergence: the effort and the pang of evolution are resumed, a revival in another frustrate world occurs, an old disillusioning cosmic history is forgotten and a compulsion is felt to renew consent to grow conscious. An aeonic vision, directly expressed, of destruction and creation on a cosmic scale is before us in Savitri's opening account."
We should reply: "The Indian cosmogonic theory of pralaya does not envisage a relapse into Inconscience. The universe is withdrawn into a Superconscience of the Unmanifest and then reprojected. In Savitri we have no such passage into Superconscience, no return of the cosmos into the First Cause, the Divine. An Inconscience, symbolised by Night, is all that is there. We may, of course, think of a recurrent relapse into a primeval Inconscience, from which a new cosmic history takes its start time and again. But we cannot bring such a relapse into tune with the Indian cosmogonic theory. What is more important, we do not even come across this kind of relapse in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. When Sri Aurobindo says that 'from a dark immense Inconscient this material world arises and out of it a soul that by evolution is struggling into consciousness',1 he conceives the process to be not repetitive at all but absolutely unique. For, considering the Why of it, 'the origin of this phenomenon', which 'stands as it were
1 The Riddle of This World (1933), p. 99.
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automatically justified in a supra-intellectual knowledge', he observes: 'To the human mind one might answer that while in itself the Infinite might be free from those perturbations [i.e., division, disharmony, pain, evil], yet once manifestation began infinite possibility also began and among the infinite possibilities which it is the function of the universal manifestation to work out, the negation, the apparent effective negation -with all its consequences - of the Power, Light, Peace, Bliss was very evidently one. If it is asked why even if possible it should have been accepted, the answer nearest to the Cosmic Truth which the human intelligence can make is that in the relations or in the transition of the Divine in the Oneness to the Divine in the Many, this ominous possible became at a certain point an inevitable.' Sri Aurobindo unequivocally affirms that to work out a Divine Emergence from the very opposite of the Divine was just 'one' possibility out of an infinite number. The remaining possibilities were all different from this. There can be no question of a cyclic evolution on a cosmic scale from a stark Inconscience in a struggling pain-fraught gradual manner through the ages. Savitri's opening account, if it directly expressed an aeonic vision of this sort of universal destruction and creation, would be absolutely non- Aurobindonian."
Yes, we have to stop with a cycle which is not aeonic but diurnal. However, in the new night that has come - the last in the married life of Satyavan and Savitri - the poet reads not only a state of the subjective being that is temporarily caught in the darkness which it feels as if that darkness were universal and eternal. The poet reads also in the new night a picture of what happened once-for-all at the commencement of cosmic history. The pointers to that history are scattered all over. I have already mentioned one: "As in a dark beginning of all things." Here is another immediately after it:
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown... [p. 1]
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A third goes with an earlier line already cited:
Almost one felt, opaque, impenetrable,
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse
The abysm of the unbodied Infinite...[Ibid.]
So the night-symbol may be considered a double one. It is suggestive or representative not only of a temporary relapse into Inconscience but also of a fundamental fall which constitutes the God-oblivious state on a cosmic scale. From this fall, as from a bodiless infinite abyss, a slow difficult return has to start of a God-memory ultimately leading to a God-realisation in terms of an embodied existence within the very cosmos where the emergence, the evolution, takes place. The depiction of that fundamental fall is the central theme of the poem's overture, even though the direct depiction is only of a particular period of darkness lasting a short time. For, the "symbol dawn" unfolds the panorama of a gradual rousing of consciousness on its way to the archetypal Superconscience and then the advent of this Superconscience itself in a passing spell of spiritual light - presage of Earth one day receiving and embodying the Divine in a supreme transfiguration of Mind and Life-force and Matter through the Soul's full awakening to the Supramental Reality that has to emerge and evolve here. The work that Savitri will do, bringing Satyavan back from the clutch of Death, of Yama who is the godhead of Inconscience, and making possible to earth the immortality of the superconscient Gods of Light, is prophesied by this dawn of the very day on which Satyavan must die. And the prophecy is touched alive through the picture of the original Inconscience and its evolutionary history.
However, the setting remains one particular night. And a skilful blending of the particular and the general - this night and the primal Night - is in the passage where the "semblance" of the original Inconscience is mentioned. We have there a switch-over from the continued past tense
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everywhere to a sudden present tense: the particular night which happened at one time, "cradled", as such nights had done repeatedly before,
...the cosmic drowse of ignorant Force
Whose moved creative slumber kindles the suns
And carries our lives in its somnambulist whirl. [Ibid.]
"Kindles" and "carries" are in the present tense, proving themselves to be generalities. They, as a letter1 puts it, "bring in a general...idea stressing the paradoxical nature of the creation and the contrasts which it contains, the drowsed somnambulist as the mother of the light of the suns and the activities of life." What is packed into the lines where the two verbs occur "is not intended as a present feature in the darkness of the Night." In other words, there is no transition from a void Inconscience to a creative movement in the Night with which the poem opens. The "suns" and "our "lives" are already there, and only the cradling goes on as ever of an ignorant Force's cosmic drowse. The creative slumber-movement belongs to the original Inconscience - it comes in here as but a truth for all time and not as a fact of the one special time whose tale Sri Aurobindo is recounting.
A truth for all time of another sort, blended with the fact of one special time, we get also in the very first line of the poem:
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
The contrast of the past tense "was" with the present tense "awake" strikes, at the poem's sheer opening, the note of one particular night to which applied a truth valid for night after night as the darkness draws to its close - namely, the commencement of the cosmic functions of light, the
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1 Savitri (1954), p. 847.
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constructive workings of the Nature-Gods. Doubtless, the past tense "awoke" also could go with one particular night, but the particularity" would not then be self-evident. The present tense leaves no alternative to the particularity. On the other hand, if the original Inconscience were meant by the Night, we should have exclusively the phrase: "before the Gods awoke." The past tense would show the once-for-all primal awakening, the once-for-all initial unfolding or evolving of consciousness-light. The present tense would be impossible, indicating as it does what would happen periodically at every dawning at the end of each night like the one which preceded the day of Satyavan's death.
Now we can come to your first two points. The various expressions employed - "The huge foreboding mind of Night", "A power of fallen boundless self", "A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown" - are all about the same thing. And the whole description shows different aspects of it. The aspects are shown successively but they do not constitute a series of successive happenings. Up to the line -
The impassive skies were neutral, empty, still [Ibid.]
we have a multitude of glimpses, on a particular occasion, of "the hour before the Gods awake", covering "the vain enormous trance of Space" and, within "the hollow gulfs" of Space, the small Earth spinning like a shadow in forgetful sleep. The entranced Space holds the once-kindled and still-burning suns: the Earth goes on carrying our lives, the innumerable generations from age to age.
As for
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,[p. 5]
the sense of the adjectives emerges when we read a little analytically the rest of the passage as well as the line preceding that opening verse:
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The message ceased and waned the messenger.
The single Call, the uncompanioned Power,
Drew back into some far-off secret world
The hue and marvel of the supernal beam...[Ibid.]
What has come into the mortal's ken for a short while is not the whole of "some far-off secret world" but just a significant suggestion from it, a message embodied in a messenger who brings "the supernal beam" but not the entire mass of luminosity lying behind it - the Sun of Truth that has projected a herald of its light in the form of the Dawn-Goddess. It is because the full glory is held back unmanifested that the Call kindled in our space and time is "single" and the Power looking out on our mortality is "uncompanioned". This phenomenon is expressed or rather indicated also in the lines:
A lonely splendour from the invisible goal
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane...
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change,...
Once she half looked behind for her veiled sun... [p. 4]
The "splendour" is "lonely" because the "sun" is still "veiled". The plenary Perfection remaining hidden in its "far beatitudes" and sending forth a flame-part to work by itself in the phenomenal universe is pictured also in the passage:
A glamour from the unreached transcendences
Iridescent with the glory of the Unseen,
A message from the unknown immortal Light... [pp. 3-4]
And later we read:
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes... [p. 5]
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The "prophetic gleam" rather than the fulfilled Sunhood is here: hence the solitariness of the Call and the Power. The solitariness has nothing to do with any distinction between the Power and the Goddess of Light and their being "uncompanioned" by each other.
The last quotation carries us naturally to your final question apropos of the phrase:
...her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.[p. 4]
The significance is not quite the same but there are keen affinities. In the latter phrase the terms contraposed are "fire" and "silence": in the former they are "miracles" and "common meaningless shapes". But the instrument at work is in both cases the divine light and, when we take into consideration the words preceding those cited by you and connect the "luminous smile" with its being "scattered on sealed depths", we find that what results in either instance is a revelation. In one the revelation is of divine forms in shapes without distinction and meaningful content - "miracles" that express in a lustrous language the soul-sense lying concealed in dense earthly things. In the other the revelation is again of what lay sealed in silence in the recesses of our manifold world - something beatifically bright that shows itself under the impact of the Dawn-Goddess's "luminous smile" in a response of self-expression which Sri Aurobindo sums up as "fire". You ask whether the meaning is: "all leapt to life" or "all rose in aspiration". Both the senses are legitimate, but the immediate direct sense is offered in the very next line:
All grew a consecration and a rite.[Ibid.]
Ordinary phenomena - air, wind, hills, boughs - became fierily activised, splendorously vitalised, into states and gestures of soul-elevating worship.
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Actually, your quotation and my quotation are parts of one whole, two concordant as well as complementary aspects of a single brief epiphany. Yours refers to the domain of Nature on its more ethereal side, so to speak; mine bears upon this domain on its more terrestrial side, the side which is "our half-lit ignorance", man's "ambiguous earth", "this anguished and precarious field of toil".1 The high "wideness"2 responds in yours; "our prostrate soil"3 answers in mine - the transfiguring touch on both is the same "awakening ray".4
2
There is a new point arising out of your explanatory note. You have taken the Dawn and the "Ambassadress twixt eternity and change" to be the same. I thought they were different. The Deity, that comes after the Dawn departs burying her aura's "seed of grandeur in the hours", is called the Goddess of eternal Light by Sri Aurobindo in a letter to you. The Dawn is always brief; it is followed by Light continuous. That is how I understood it. Would you again help?
No doubt, the Dawn is brief, but can it, for that reason, be debarred from being the Goddess of eternal Light? The function of the Spiritual Dawn, like the operation of the physical dawn, is to come as a herald and then disappear. But merely because Usha - to use the Rigvedic name and figure - appears for a short duration to do her work, is she herself a short-lived entity? She is surely an emanation or manifestation of eternal Light. Eternal Light briefly revealing itself does not cease to be eternal. In a general way not only Dawn but all experiences of spiritual luminosity last a short time under the conditions of the present natural and mortal
_________
1Ibid.
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4Ibid.
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life in the cosmos. Does not Sri Aurobindo state this truth when he writes:
Only a little the God-light can stay...?[p. 5]
Can we affirm that by staying only a little the God-light is disqualified from being in itself eternal or, as you put it, continuous?
To come directly to your own terms of opposition: the Dawn and the Ambassadress. You say the Dawn departs after burying her aura's seed of grandeur in the hours. I believe you do so on the strength of the lines:
An instant's visitor the godhead shone:
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood... [p. 4]
A slightly earlier support for you may be the verse in the same context:
The brief perpetual sign recurred above.[p. 3]
Your very word "brief" is here. But it is coupled with what seems its contradiction: "perpetual". Of course, we can say that the sign is perpetual in that it is recurrent, it is brief again and again: the recurring brevity is its sole perpetualness. Quite true, but let us see what the Vision did as it stood awhile, an instant's visitor:
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns...[p. 4]
With the old Vedic word "greatness" (mahimā) ringing in my ears, I suspect that in "perpetual" there is also a subtle shade of "eternal", a suggestion of something from the Everlasting:
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the brief sign is itself eternity packed in a moment. This is but natural when that Dawn is called
A message from the unknown immortal Light... [Ibid.]
And, after all, what is it that shone as an instant's visitor? The reply from the poem itself is: "the godhead." Are we to think that this godhead is not of eternal Light? In the line just quoted, "immortal Light" is declared to have sent the Dawn as its "message". The message may have lasted for a brief duration, yet it must have been made of the stuff of immortality if it came from the Light that is immortal.
Further, even supposing the Dawn to have been essentially non-continuous and to have departed, does the Ambassadress whom you identify as the Goddess of eternal Light fare really any better? First we may observe that, like the Dawn, she is also called a "vision" as well as a mere fore-glimpse:
Here too the vision and prophetic gleam...[p. 5]
Next we may realise that the general truth couched in the verse already quoted -
Only a little the God-light can stay -
is uttered in the context of none else than your Goddess of eternal Light. And it is about her we read:
Then the divine afflatus, spent, withdrew,
Unwanted, fading from the mortal's range.[Ibid.]
The Ambassadress's life is hardly Methuselahite: very soon it is "spent" and starts "fading". This sad truth is confirmed by other verses:
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That transitory glow of magic fire
So now dissolved in bright accustomed air.
The message ceased and waned the messenger....
Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.[Ibid.]
The light of the Ambassadress is termed "that transitory glow" and is said to dissolve, cease, wane and get expunged, yet all this does not prevent it from being not only "magic fire", "body of glory", "rarity and wonder" but also - as some previous lines imply - "spiritual beauty" which "squanders eternity on a beat of Time".
The Ambassadress and the Dawn are essentially in the same case: the "brief" is the "eternal" as well, and the "eternal" is the "brief" too. The pair are, as a colloquialism would put it, much of a muchness. A ground is thus initially created for identifying them. And this ground is seen to be veritable terra firma as soon as we ask: "What phase of time, after the Night, is represented by the Ambassadress?" If she is different from the Dawn, what is she? Sunrise is the only phenomenon succeeding the Dawn. Is .the Ambassadress the Day itself? That is impossible since precisely of her Sri Aurobindo writes:
She "writ to her immortal work" before the sun was unveiled: she thus cannot be any part of the Day. And, if she cannot, she has to be nothing save the Dawn.
The fact is: the Dawn, however brief, has several phases or "transitions". Commenting on a certain passage Sri Aurobindo1 indicates some of them coming on the heels of the darkness: "There is first a black quietude, then the persistent touch, then the first 'beauty and wonder' leading
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1 Savitri (1954), pp. 828-9.
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to the magical gate and the 'lucent corner'. Then comes the failing of the darkness, the simile used ['a falling cloak'] suggesting the rapidity of the change. Then as a result the change of what was once a rift into a wide luminous gap... Then all changes into a 'brief perpetual sign', the iridescence, then the blaze and the magnificent aura." The next phase is
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page [Ibid.]
and the statement is made:
Almost that day the epiphany was disclosed...
Almost was flung on the opaque Inane.[Ibid.]
The epiphanic phase leads on to a greater nearness or brightness of the Dawn-Goddess. Her very tread is heard and her Face opens heaven and her Form brings beatitude close. She is now called "the omniscient Goddess" and she soon
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds[Ibid.]
and
Lit into miracles common meaningless shapes[p. 5]
and completed her symbolic job:
The prescience of a marvellous birth to come.[Ibid.]
But the divinity, the earth-transforming supernal Power, which she images forth through the process of time, is unwanted by the mortal's world and so she fades away into "the common light of earthly day".
A gloss of particular pertinence, that emerges from Sri Aurobindo's catalogue of phases, is: the line on the "brief
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perpetual sign" is not an all-covering one for the Dawn's nature, it is just a single phase among many - a phase succeeded by the "iridescence" and then the "blaze" and the "magnificent aura". What is intended by the line is, as it were, an announcement - very short in its duration though everlasting in its process and purpose - of the multicoloured glamour and the wide-burning message. Neither of the two epithets - "brief perpetual" - are directly meant to characterise the whole Dawn any more than the substantive "sign" is meant to do so. To make the whole Dawn brief, one would have to fall back only upon the words "instant" and "awhile" coming a little later.
However, you will notice that, although the Dawn is designated as "an instant's visitor" who is also a "Vision" that stood "awhile", she is nowhere explicitly said to fade or dissolve. On the contrary, she goes on doing things: bending over earth's forehead curve, interpreting hidden beauty and unfamiliar bliss, writing the lines of a myth, penning a brilliant code on the sky-page. Where do you find that the Dawn "departs"? To bury her aura's seed of grandeur in the hours is surely not tantamount to the Dawn herself getting buried! The Dawn merely impregnates with a spark of the Divine the world of time and space and she does this not by herself disappearing but by building her aura of magnificent hues. The disappearance of the light preceding the sunrise -the fading of the Dawn, that is to say - comes only when the
Ambassadress twixt eternity and change[p. 4]
has carried out certain revelatory functions. Hence the Ambassadress cannot be other than the Dawn herself in her most developed and final God-goldenness.
To "cap, crown and clinch" all that I have said I shall turn to Sri Aurobindo's letter, to which you have referred. He does mention "the Goddess of eternal Light" but there is no distinction made between her and the Dawn-Goddess.
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In fact, the clear implication is just the opposite. Here is the text:1 "that passage in my symbolic vision of Night and Dawn in which there is recorded the conscious adoration of Nature when it feels the passage of the omniscient Goddess of eternal Light." The Goddess in question is here said to figure in Sri Aurobindo's "symbolic vision of Night and Dawn". There is no going beyond the Dawn. Whatever follows the Night in the vision falls within the Dawn-category. Again, in the same letter, when he is discussing "the conscious adoration of Nature" which is connected with the Goddess of eternal Light, he2 remarks apropos of the line –
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky. :[Ibid.]
"This last line is an expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times..." The phrase – "not only in the dawn" – means in the first place that the phenomenon of "all grew a consecration and a rite" as a result of the Goddess's "luminous smile" can happen in the dawn. It means in the second place that, although in the poem it happens in the dawn, it can happen also in other phases of our twenty-four-hour cycle. So, as far as the poem is concerned, there is no going beyond Usha to some "Deity" coming after her. At a later place in the same letter we get one more indication of what I have been trying to demonstrate. Sri Aurobindo3 writes in reply to a certain aspect of the criticism my friend Mendonça made: "His objection of longueur would be perfectly just if the description of the night and the dawn had been simply of physical night and physical dawn; but here the physical night and physical dawn are, as the title of the canto clearly suggests, a symbol,
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1Ibid., p. 901.
2Ibid., p. 904.
3Ibid., p. 907.
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although what may be called a real symbol of an inner reality and the main purpose is to describe by suggestion the thing symbolised; here it is a relapse into Inconscience broken by a slow and difficult return of consciousness followed by a brief but splendid and prophetic outbreak of spiritual light leaving behind it the 'day' of ordinary human consciousness in which the prophecy has to be worked out." Mark that Sri Aurobindo talks only of night and dawn and refers to the former as "a relapse into Inconscience" and to the latter in terms that combine adjectives and nouns such as the Canto uses at both the beginning and the end of the account of the growing spiritual luminousness magically preceding the common daylight. "Brief" and "splendid" remind us of your "Dawn": "prophetic outbreak of spiritual light" recalls your "Goddess of eternal Light". The whole inevitable impression left is that your two entities are one, in a varied progression of self-disclosure.
Of course, as we find from Sri Aurobindo's list of "transitions" or phases, the epithet "brief" occurring in the beginning of the account has a bearing different from the same epithet in the above sentence. The former applied merely to a particular step in the progression, the latter serves to give a characteristic of the whole movement. But my point is that what you define as "brief" - namely, the phenomenon prior to the Ambassadress's arrival - gets equated here, by the employment of the same defining term, with what includes this arrival no less than that phenomenon. Sri Aurobindo has put both parts of the account together as the story of a single divine manifestation through a series of Nature-moments, both that phenomenon and this arrival being called "outbreak of spiritual light".
The continuing identity of a single process, the developing disclosure of no more than one divine entity, Usha the spiritual Dawn, can be yet again established from another observation of Sri Aurobindo's in the very letter we are drawing upon. He is discoursing on my friend's objection to repetition of
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the cognates "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void", "opaque Inane", "vacant Vasts", especially as they fall into the same place at the end of the line. Sri Aurobindo1 writes: "What was important for me was to keep constantly before the view of the reader...the ever-present sense of the Inconscience in which everything is occurring. It is the frame as well as the background without which all the details would either fall apart or stand out only as separate incidents. That necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn and then it disappears; each phrase gives a feature of this Inconscience proper to its place and context. It is the entrance of the 'lonely splendour' into an otherwise inconscient obstructing and unreceptive world that has to be brought out and that cannot be done without the image of the 'opaque Inane' of the Inconscience which is the scene and cause of the resistance. There is the same necessity for reminding the reader that the 'tread' of the Divine Mother was an intrusion on the vacancy of the Inconscience and the herald of deliverance from it."
I have cited Sri Aurobindo's observation in full in order precisely to bring out the apparent opposition of the "lonely splendour" (which you attribute to the Dawn) and the "Divine Mother" (whom you would identify with a Deity coming after the Dawn and acting as the "Ambassadress") - yes, to bring out this "opposition" and then show the complete reconcilement. I want to prove that the Divine Mother is herself the Dawn and that the "opposition" is just the succession of different aspects of the Dawn who is the Divine Mother. Take the verse about the Divine Mother's advent:
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts... [p. 4]
Now, "vacant Vasts" is set by Sri Aurobindo along with "sombre Vast", "unsounded Void" and "opaque Inane" as
1 Ibid., p. 908.
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one of the cognate expressions whose "necessity lasts until there is the full outburst of the dawn". It is the Dawn and nothing else but the Dawn that is continuing all through and the tread of the Divine Mother is a portion of the process before the Dawn's full outburst: it is a phase of the Dawn-Goddess's gradual unfoldment of her "eternal Light".
I am afraid I have over-laboured my thesis. I have done so because I felt you wanted the answer to your new point to be completely convincing to your understanding. An all-round treatment seemed desirable. And perhaps the final touch to the needed all-roundness will be given if in conclusion I hark back to the Rigveda for some descriptions of the Dawn as being no other than the Goddess of eternal Light and as doing what Sri Aurobindo's Ambassadress does - the Rigveda whose imagery so often gleams out in Savitri.
Usha is described in I. 113.19, mātā devānām adder anīkam, "Mother of the gods, form (or power) of Aditi." A Rik (80.1) of the fifth Mandala presents Usha as "a form from far beatitudes" coming near: it describes her as dytad-yāmānam brhatīm rtena rtāvarim svar āvahamtīm, "of a luminous movement, vast with the Truth, supreme in (or possessed of) the Truth, bringing with her Swar." The same role is played in VII. 81.3: yā vahasipuru sparham na dāsuse mayah, "thou who bearest to the giver the beatitude as a manifold and desirable ecstasy." Then we have an analogue of the "face of rapturous calm" parting "the eternal lids that open heaven" in VII. 75.1: vyusa āvo divijā rtena, āviskrnvānā mahimānam āgāt, "Dawn born in heaven opens out things by the Truth, she comes manifesting the greatness." Savitri's "omniscient Goddess" kindling the silent worlds to fire is the Rigveda's "young and ancient goddess of many thoughts, shining out on us immortal,... uttering the words of Truth", she who fronting "the worlds of the becoming stands aloft over them all as the vision of Immortality" (III. 61.3).
(Sri Aurobindo - The Poet, 1999, pp. 163-81)
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